Various types of earth-moving and excavating machinery are equipped with digging buckets (having digging teeth facing toward the machine) or dippers (having teeth facing away from the machine), including front end loaders, back hoes, hydraulic excavators, mining shovels and the like. The digging buckets typically have several teeth to enhance material removal. Since the primary wear areas on the buckets are the bucket lip and the teeth, many buckets have replaceable teeth and lip shrouds.
In a typical replaceable-tooth assembly a tooth point with a hollowed-out rearward portion forming a socket is fitted over the nose of an adaptor attached to the bucket or the lip shroud. In a typical assembly the tooth point socket is removably secured to the adaptor by a pin extending through aligned openings in the adaptor and tooth point. To secure the assembly, the locking pin is usually retained by a pin or ring that interengages with a notch or slot in the pin.
Some prior designs have used a locking pin extending vertically through the tooth point. However, in such designs, the heads of the pin are exposed to the main body of earth going into the bucket and to the earth below so that rocks often hit the heads of the pin causing deformation and dirt wedges between the pin and the receiving hole. Consequently, the pin is difficult to remove and much time is required to replace such tooth points.
In other designs the locking pin has been disposed horizontally, but the removal of the locking pin has in many cases been difficult because of the force required to extract the pin or its keeper and the limited space between teeth, which inhibits access and the application of force.